Autopsy: Detroit Imam Shot 20 times at FBI Raid

DETROIT (AP) -- A Muslim prayer leader accused of encouraging his followers to commit violence against the U.S. government was shot 20 times during an FBI raid at a suburban warehouse last fall, according to an autopsy report released Monday.

The autopsy was completed a month after Luqman Ameen Abdullah's death, but Dearborn police were granted a delay in releasing the results while they investigate the Oct. 28 shooting, said Dr. Carl Schmidt, Wayne County's chief medical examiner.

Abdullah, 53, died instantly, he said. The FBI says agents were trying to arrest Abdullah at a Dearborn warehouse when he resisted and fired a gun.

Schmidt said Abdullah's body was handcuffed and on the floor of a semitrailer when his investigator arrived at the shooting scene.

"You cannot tell by the gunshot wounds whether he was lying down, standing up, sitting" when he was shot, Schmidt told reporters. "It is impossible to say which one was the fatal gunshot wound. It was a combination of gunshot wounds."

FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said anyone subject to an arrest warrant is handcuffed "no matter what the circumstances" for the safety of agents and the public.

Abdullah, also known as Christopher Thomas, was the imam of a small mosque in Detroit that served mostly black Muslims. At the time, he and 11 allies were being pursued for federal crimes, chiefly conspiracy to sell stolen goods in an FBI sting operation.

The FBI says Abdullah was spreading a radical anti-government ideology that called for an Islamic state within the U.S. His family denies it. There were no terror-related charges.

Dearborn police still are investigating Abdullah's death. Earlier Monday, Chief Ron Haddad said it will take several more weeks before detectives finish their work and share their findings with the Michigan attorney general's office.

"I'm not going to engage in opinions on the use of force," Haddad said when asked if agents fired too many times. "Whether it clears them, whether they're prosecuted, it'll be up to the next level."

He promised a "clear, honest and objective evaluation."

The shooting also is being examined by the FBI's Inspection Division, which will send results to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said Berchtold, who called it a standard procedure.

"This is one piece of information from that day," she said of the 20 shots. "We'd like to ask people to wait for all the facts to come out to determine an overall reaction. The events that actually occurred in the warehouse have not been publicized."

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations want a separate investigation. Outside the Dearborn Police Department, a small group of protesters stood near a sign that said, "Stop FBI Terror!"

A lawyer for Abdullah's family, Nabih Ayad, questioned the FBI's tactics.

"A lot of raids are conducted when a suspect has a gun. That doesn't mean you shoot them 20 times," Ayad said in an interview.

Schmidt said the 20 shots caused 21 wounds, mostly on the left side of Abdullah's body, from the abdomen down.